Marked by the exhilarating formlessness of artists like Arca, Elysia Crampton, and Lotic, this year’s vanguard electronic music resisted bite-sized, EDM-style consumption as it offered an endless malleability that spoke to our culture’s increasingly fluid sense of identity. By Philip Sherburne.

World weary rap courtesy of Vince Staples and Future. Vulnerable folk from Joanna Newsom and Sufjan Stevens. Thundercat and Kamasi Washington’s astral musings. The welcomed comebacks of Dr. Dre and Sleater-Kinney. All of that and more makes up our Top 50 albums of the year.

A collection of our favorite quotables from the interviews we did this year, including Madonna on modern loneliness, Earl Sweatshirt on proverbs, Bradford Cox on dogs, Jamie xx on (not) smoking weed, Sufjan Stevens on God, and much more.